Delecta Voles and their insane requirements (Reduce them)

[The Toblin]

Curried Beans is a decent meal. The buffs are very nice, in spite of the stress+ and it's got an okay morale boost. However, compared to every other meal, even the burgers, the amount of insane logistics and effort (not to mention RESOURCE COST) you have to go through to feed even a single delecta enough to make it produce quills is absolutely bonkers.

Let's have a look

- You need to feed them 4.8t of regolith, dirt or iron PER CYCLE PER DELECTA

- The food needs to be either heated to 70 degrees or cooled below 80 degrees C

- Heating/cooling several tons of material per cycle is almost impossible using regular methods (conveyors only transport 20kg/s)

- Producing 5t of dirt PER DELECTA (even just 4 delectas is 20t) is virtually impossible

- Regolith is the only feasible material, but only if you have an infinite supply on the asteroid you are ranching delectas on. Transporting it is completely impossible for even a small ranch.

- Delectas constantly escape, requiring not only their domicile to be a certain temperature, their food be in a *very* narrow temperature span, but it also has to be either isolated from the rest of the colony, or built out of metal tiles or obsidian.

- After delectas have eaten, they expel half their eaten food as a natural tile, which has to be mined away (losing half the resources, so in effect, you only get 25% back from what you fed them, not 50%)

The above requirements make these a "for the lulz" vanity project you do to challenge yourself. They're entirely infeasible as a usable food source. You might be able to produce the very occasional curried beans meal, but there's no chance in hell you'll ever be able to feed a colony of 12+ dupes. For reference, 12 dupes, which is a decent late-game colony (even pretty small) would require almost 10 delectas just to produce the quills (that's not even counting the beans needed). 10 delectas would need to eat 50 tons of regolith/dirt/iron in a very narrow temperature span to produce the required quills. Sure, you get 12 tons back as mined material, but you still have to supply the 50 tons every cycle.

Outside of some extremely gimmicky builds, I cannot see this be reasonable in the least. I don't mind the extreme nitpickyness of their temperature, the difficulty breeding them in the first place or even that they escape. Those are all things that can be dealt with, but why in the seven realms of heaven do they require such astronomical amounts of food just to function?

Outside of an occasional, small novelty build, I haven't seen anyone even consider ever making curried beans. Most people build petroleum boilers and SGCs (Sour gas condensors) eventually, and while they are luxury wares, people still make them almost every game. I've never seen anyone make curried beans as a regular things. In my mind, it's way easier to get the hated carnivore achievement than trying to make delecta voles work. This shouldn't be the case for a morph. Most morphs have some use, even if it's niche. Delectas don't. They are too costly and require too much effort to even produce the occasional curried beans.

I ask only that you change their dietary needs so it would be possible to at least run a normal sized (8) ranch without having to devote your entire cluster just to feed these critters.